What is Saito?

Saito is forum software with real conversation threading: every reply visibly hangs off the posting it answers. Arrive late and you can still see who is replying to what – three hundred postings in.

It was built for long-lived communities: a manageable number of people, but hundreds of thousands of postings in the archive. Saito puts hundreds of them on a single page and does it on ordinary shared hosting.

What Saito does

Threading

Every reply hangs off the posting it answers. A topic can be skimmed as a tree or read straight through.

Read state

Saito remembers per member what is new – across years and hundreds of thousands of postings.

Categories

Areas with their own read permissions. Each member picks which ones to see.

Editor

Markup by button from bold to spoiler, images and video by address or upload, preview cards for links, and a preview before posting.

Search

Full text in the page header, plus an advanced search by person, category and period.

Bookmarks

Keep a posting, with a note of your own.

Ignoring

Hide someone you would rather not read – without the other side being told.

Moderation

Move postings, merge threads, suspend an account for a while, manage categories and permissions.

Feeds

RSS, public or personally signed, and notification by email.

Themes

Nova as a modern base, light and dark; other themes build on it.

No third parties

No remote fonts, no tracking pixels, no external embeds. Nothing a page does leaves your own server.

Why move to 8.2

Running 5.7 today means running software from 2020 on foundations that no longer exist in that form.

Foundations

CakePHP 3 to 5, PHP 8.4. Saito 5 runs on no supported PHP version any more.

Security

An audit in July 2026 found a stored cross-site scripting hole in the profile and a way to move postings into categories one had no business in. Both are closed – in 5.7 they are not.

Less machinery

The JavaScript frontend is gone. Pages arrive rendered and are enhanced only where it helps: 52 npm dependencies and 47,000 lines fewer.

Help

The help pages were missing from the release package, so every installation reported “no help available”. They ship now, in two languages.

Fixed

The search's time filter, the member list past its first hundred names, a member's own colours for unread postings, notes on bookmarks – things that had quietly done nothing for years.

Effort

From 5.7 it is a database update with instructions. Within 8.x, copying the files is enough.

Current release: 8.4.8, 16 August 2026.

The history

2012–14

Schlaefer starts Saito on 3 February 2012, as a successor to an ageing mylittleforum. Three years and more than 3,200 commits follow, up to version 4.

2015–17

4.8.0 arrives in November 2015, and then it goes quiet for the first time: two years without a commit.

2018–20

A second push. Version 5 arrives in June 2019, the last release 5.7.1 in August 2020; the final commit lands that October.

2021–25

Five years without a single change. The forums keep running while the foundations age – PHP and the framework move on without them.

2026

On 24 May, Panxatony picks development back up. The engine room is rebuilt: CakePHP 3 to 5, PHP 8.4, and the old JavaScript interface gives way to server-rendered HTML. Versions 6, 7 and 8 in a little over two months.

Saito is open source (MIT) and stays that way. The thanks for everything it is built on belong to Schlaefer.

Try it

macnemo.de runs on Saito – the everyday place to see how it feels. To run it yourself you need PHP 8.4 and a MySQL or MariaDB database; the release package brings the rest. Unzip it and open it in a browser.